1. Technical Field
The technical field relates to a printing apparatus, and relates particularly to a three dimensional (3-D) printing apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
Along with advances in computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), the manufacturing industry developed rapid prototyping (RP) which is capable of quickly manufacturing primitive design ideas. 3-D printing namely is a form of rapid prototyping that uses a digital 3-D model as a basis, and is a technology for constructing a 3-D object through a method of stacking a layer by layer, cumulatively. Traditionally, 3-D printing has frequently been used in fields such as mold manufacturing, industrial design or manufacturing of models, and currently is gradually being used to manufacture some products directly. Particularly, some expensive applications (for example, hip-joints or teeth, or some components for aircrafts) already use components printed and formed by this type of technology, indicating the popularity of “3-D Printing” technology.
Taking the technique of forming a 3-D structure through powdered material as an example, this type of 3-D printing technology disseminates a powder layer (for example: powdered ceramic, powdered metal, or powdered plastic) of approximately 100 microns thick on an operating surface, then sprays a bonding material on to the powder by using a specially designed printing head to bond the powder at a particular area into a layer, and then repeatedly executing the above mentioned steps to form each layer of powder layer sequentially, and stacking each layer of powder layer together to form the 3-D object.
The above described technique was originally for facilitating the quick manufacturing of prototypes of 3-D elements. However, many current methods for dispensing powder onto the printing surface use a roller rolling from one end to another end of the printing machine to evenly pave powder of a supplying platform that is originally located on a rolling path of the roller onto the operating surface. After the printing head sprays bonding material onto the printing surface, the roller is required to roll back to the initial position to perform printing of the next layer. Therefore, the 3-D printing efficiency of this technology is still very slow and does not meet quick and high production rate requirements.